


Exorcism

by mustinvestigate



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-02
Updated: 2011-06-02
Packaged: 2017-10-20 01:15:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/207248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mustinvestigate/pseuds/mustinvestigate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan has a vivid and mean-spirited imagination.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Exorcism

You only think of him as anything remotely sexual when you’re furious. Not just angry, not every time he casually passes judgement and finds both you and the world wanting, or you’d have jerked off in all the city’s most fetid back alleys and reflexively twitch to hardness at the scamper of little rat feet. No, these brilliantly sick fantasies only crowd every other thought out of your head when Mr Pure As Driven Snow makes a special effort to ram what he considers your debauched, liberal failings down your throat. The fingers that itch to wring that scrawny freckled neck find a better use for their time.

It’s just not fair. The socially retarded psychopath whose attitude screams “thirty-year-old virgin,” who seemingly only bathes when a woman’s accidental touch gives him cooties, manages to make you feel like an erotomaniacal freak. Red-faced and spiteful, biting your tongue – you can’t possibly win these arguments, not when your partner can describe the negotiable virtue of prostitutes with encyclopaedic scorn – you burn to teach him some lessons in return.

There’s no way he’s as free of sexual urges as he insists. You’ve known some truly asexual specimens in the depths of Harvard’s graduate laboratories. The world of co-ed mating rituals went on in a completely separate venn diagram from them, never splashing over to ripple the surfaces of their real obsessions. Rorschach, on the other hand, makes it his life’s work to get as close as possible to every perversion and be disgusted by it, gleefully meting out punishment.

You just want to give him that little push, through the critical membrane he clings to, into the muck he compulsively orbits.

You remember your big cousin Burt, who eventually got fragged during his first week in Korea, slapping your own limp hand into your face and his idiot chortling, _stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself, hehhahaha_ , and that feels almost right. You want him flushed and struggling and on the verge of swallowing his tongue as he begs to be allowed to touch himself. You want him to grovel on his knees for every filthy act he nightly condemns.

And then, only then, you’ll tell him it’s too disgusting to contemplate.

Laurie reduced you to hysterics, after she joined the two of you in cleaning out that kiddie porn ring on the lower east side, speculating (and sounding like a world-weary old glamour queen instead of the fresh-faced kid who swings her legs under the diner’s high stool) that Rorschach spends his days flitting between the city’s most expensive dominatrixes. She growled: _hit me harder, burn me with your cigarette, walk through blocks of dog shit before I lick your boots clean_.

You begged her to stop before helpless laughter (and the imagery) made you puke. That, and fellow mask or not, no one’s allowed to run down your partner but you, and then only privately. So you don’t dish, you don’t point out that Rorschach sullenly ignores prostitutes when they don’t need rescuing, pointing a stiff back at their insults, but the hustlers…you’ve had to pull him off more than a few dangerously cocky pretty boys after nothing worse than a murmured invitation, aimed at him or you.

That, and the way he treats a handshake like an offer of oral sex, flinches away from any touch outside combat, has led you to the conviction your partner, the embodiment of the moral majority, is gay as a barrel of…very angry celibate monkeys.

Which makes his insults both sadder and more irritating, coming from someone with more adventures in Narnia than the Pevensie siblings.

And it was _Playboy_ , for God’s sake! That was practically tasteful! You couldn’t get any more red-blooded American without restricting your spank material to cheesecake cuties painted on A-bombs. You’d made coffee, stepped into the shower (unlike some people!) to wash off the night’s patrol, and returned to the shock of your erotic collection spread out on the kitchen table and the crossed-arm glare of a puppy owner about to give a nose-rubbing lesson on the difference between paper and carpet.

You’d been gone three minutes! How did Rorschach even find them – hidden, out of habit, between advanced aeronautics textbooks – in three minutes? You’d occasionally suspected your partner systematically went through your belongings every time you turned your back, but rejected the thoughts as unfair paranoia.

Obviously, you were wrong.

What you should have done next was what you’d do to any punk on the street who tried the old ‘what kind of faggot wears tights’ routine – lash out with a brutal punch before they even finished the sentence. Respond with efficient violence where they expect stammering defensiveness about freedom of movement or only buying it for the articles. Forget the fact you were clad only in a towel and still dripping wet down your back – in fact, fling the terrycloth away and tackle the bastard to the cold floor.

This is what you would have done, if you’d known that three days later, shaking off most of the mortification, you’d go to the bookshelf looking for a reliable old favourite and discover someone had blacked out all the pictures with a magic marker, leaving the text intact.

He fights dirtier than you can ever hope to, but all that warm, damp, naked skin…he’d have to touch it to push you away. Even with his filthy gloves between you, that would short-circuit his keen strategic mind, leaving only the need to escape. He’d squirm, almost slipping away along the cold linoleum, but you’re bigger and heavier. Your weight holds him down, that and the mortification of what he’s wriggling against like one of his despised whores.

He exhales those near-frantic hnk! hnk! noises and demands to be let up in a growl that’s sharp with growing panic. You grin wolfishly at the back of his head, agree in a cheerful aren’t-we-great-buddies-with-our-manly-roughhousing voice, and push yourself up, but before he can scramble away you let yourself fall and knock the wind out of him against the floor.

(You twist in the sheets, kicking your mutilated magazines to the floor.)

The distraction of his momentarily paralysed lungs won’t hold him for long. You work quickly, dragging him to his feet – he fights, of course, but his punches are weakened by the pain in his chest and not wanting to make contact – and shove him across the kitchen table. A few of the magazines fall, but his face is smashed firmly in those that remain and you hope he has just enough time to sincerely regret ever starting this.

(You kick the bedclothes off the mattress, away from your overheated skin. It occurs to you it’d be very like him to want to watch the results of his little prank, gloat over your chastened response, and you push the thought almost out of your mind. You don’t double-check that the bedroom curtains are closed.)

Quickly, quickly, wrench the coat and suit jacket off together. All those layers of the three-piece suit, bonded with years of sweat and other people’s blood, have got to be almost as effective as your own armour by now. He’s breathing again, great shuddering gasps under your splayed hands, so you change tactics and unwind the grime-grey scarf. You’ve seen this skin before, revealed and practically steaming for brief seconds on hot summer nights, the color of strawberry ice cream in the shade.

You bite down on the span of muscle between his neck and shoulder, and he stiffens, but he doesn’t try to buck you off until you ease off and lick the abused skin.

(You drag your nails along your neck, shivering at the scrape along stubble.)

Knock off the hat, but the mask stays. This isn’t one of those times where he takes it off after a hard-won bust, finally offering the gift of his identity. There’s nothing he has to offer you, right now. You give in to the urge to tease him with the possibility you might, running your tongue along the bottom edge as he redoubles his effort to push you off, but you’ve got him pinned against the table. He tugs down his mask with both hands, completely distracted from you undoing his pants.

He’s half-hard already. You’ve seen that before, where he pauses mid-tussle to re-tie his trench tighter to his body. As if that does anything but accentuate the bulge. You, at least, have designed a cup to hide the inevitable physiological reaction. Trapped between your hand and your own building erection, he begins to talk.

“I’ll be going now, Daniel,” he says with an impressive veneer of calm, as if he was finishing his second refill of sweet coffee and not shivering with his trousers around his ankles and your fingers working open his boxers. It’s as close as he’ll come to an apology, that he’s learned his lesson and doesn’t need to stay after class writing a hundred times across the blackboard _I will not dig though my partner’s personal possessions and call him a pervert_.

(You slide your hands along your bare thighs, quick and perfunctory – you aren’t really in a foreplay mood just now.)

“Daniel? Let – let me up.” Not “let me go” – that would require acknowledging the blood rushing to his groin, hurrying through the big vein under your fingers – but something you say to a friend suffering from boisterous high spirits. His body betrays the words, pushing back into yours.

“I’m leaving now,” he insists again, shifting minutely until the backs of his bony thighs are lined up with your legs.

(Probably all but hairless, you think, remembering the stubble he doesn’t seem to need to shave but once or twice a week. Smooth.)

He shivers at the scrape of wiry hair along always-protected skin, and his voice cracks. “Daniel?”

You’d thought of tying his arms back with his scarf, but, no need. His fingers are locked around the edge of the table across from him. It would only be an act of pity to let him delude himself you were forcing him to stay now.

(Did the curtain twitch? Just the early-morning breeze. You have too much imagination.)

He’s rock-hard now and pressing into the table painfully. You take him in hand, offering that much mercy, and he chokes back a moan. He tries to rock into your hand but you press his hips firmly against the table. He’s not running this show.

(Dear god, you’re hard, ready to burst. Later, as always, you’ll be helpless against your own analytical brain, dissecting exactly why this gets you so hot and bothered and, blushing, planning how to convince your girlfriend to try out some costume roleplaying, as soon as you can get past a second date and maybe have a girlfriend, but right now all you can think of is how damn good the simple movement of skin feels and that nothing short of a nuclear blast can stop this motion…)

You thrust yourself forward, trapped between your belly and the soft skin of his lower back, feeling the duelling rhythm of two pulses where you touch. You trace the bumps of his spine with your free hand, counting freckles.

(He’d have a scar on his shoulder from last year’s knife wound, the rough crescent slash he finally let you clean out and stitch up after you lectured him for twenty minutes on infection and tetanus and goddamn it do you think I’ll be able to pick you out of a line-up based on a mole on your back, and even then he didn’t take his shirt off completely, just let it droop down on that side and watched you over his shoulder, grunting at every swipe and prick.)

“Please,” he’s moaning now, mask outlining his open mask as he gasps. “Please…”

“No,” you whisper into the ear-shaped bump and yank him back from the table, spinning him around. He falls to his knees, boneless with confusion and frustrated arousal, and you hold his head steady in front of you.

You’re close, so damn close, fisting yourself inches from the shifting blots, and his head is tilted upward, and behind that blank expression you know his eyes are locked with yours, mouth agape, enraged and demanding and hurting…

(The curtains move again as you squeak, the noise swallowed by the blood rushing by your eardrums.)

You come, knees trembling, and splatter across the clean division of black and white, steady dripping islands on a sea of furious ripples.


End file.
